The present invention relates to an electronic filing system and a method of operation, and more particularly, to a filing system for electronic representations of documents, such as text documents, graphical documents, or captured images of documents.
In a computer-based, or electronic, filing system there are many situations in which a file is expected to arrive in the future but is not currently available in the context of interest.
One example is in a processing system for handling, for example, mortgage application documents. An application for a property mortgage will normally involve an application form being processed, followed by other documents which are also required, but which may arrive later. For example, such documents might include a written survey of the property, a reference from the applicant's employer, copies of salary statements, a credit-check form, or a written guarantee from a guarantor. Even later, but equally essential, documents may include a copy of the property transaction, or a copy of the property deed.
Another example is where a person is expected to produce a document periodically, such as a monthly report.
A further example is where a letter or message is sent requesting a reply. The outgoing message document may be stored in electronic form, and a reply to the message is explicitly requested. This could apply to a document handling system, or to an electronic messaging system, such as an e-mail system.
A yet further example is a workflow system for monitoring the situation of pending work. A resulting file is expected to be inputted into the workflow system upon completion of a pending task, so that the state of the task can be updated.
Conventionally, filing systems deal with expected occurrences, for example, expected future documents or replies, by setting a reminder entry in an automatic scheduling system. For example, the reminder may be a calendar reminder that a certain document or task is expected to be completed. Such systems therefore mirror or simulate a typical manual office system, in which a calendar schedule is used as a prompt for the expected file.
In a related field, further problems lie in the relatively inelegant current methods which a user generally has to use for scanning a paper document into a document filing system. Generally, this involves the user manually running a scanning application to capture a digital image of the paper document, and then manually controlling any conversion utilities to transform the captured image (such as optical character recognition (OCR) to convert a captured image to text). Once this has been completed, the user has to manually save or upload the file into the document filing system. The document file is allocated a specific filename after scanning; it is not normally possible to allocate a specific filename in advance (i.e., prior to scanning). The conventional technique therefore requires considerable user input, and is time consuming and inconvenient to have to repeat for a large number of paper documents.
It would therefore be desirable to improve the way in which expected files are handled in an electronic filing system.